This 8-bit computer is hand-made, down to the motherboard

If you’re looking for a real DIY challenge, try building your own computer. We don’t mean price out the components and assemble it yourself when all of the parts land on your door, we mean follow the example of Jack Eisenmann, creator of the Duo Adept.

The Duo Adept is a hand-built computer created from scratch using over 100 TTL chips, a good soldering iron, and lots of time and energy. It clocks in at 64KB of main system memory and a whopping 256 bytes of RAM. Consider it “Pong ready.”

Eisenmann is a programmer himself, so he built his own operating system for the Duo Adept, starting from binary and working his way up. Ultimately the OS is only about 263 lines of code, but that’s enough to get it to play Pong and a few other hand-crafted games. He even wrote versions of Get Muffins and Conway’s Game of Life for his creation to play.

Eisenmann designed the graphics processor and the CPU himself on a breadboard with a soldering iron, and lots of wire to connect all of the points while he tested everything. Even locked down and in its Tupperware box case, you can still see masses of wire between parts of the board. Best of all, it doesn’t need any cooling or airflow, and he can always pop open the top of the Tupperware case to make modifications or changes if he has to.

It’s not a marketable product, and you won’t see the Duo Adept on your local electronics store shelves anytime soon, but that was never the point. Eisenmann designed and built his own computer in a time when most PCs are off-the-shelf, snap-together affairs. The Duo Adept reminds us of the PC’s humble beginnings: a ton of wire, a power source, and instruction sets. If you’re interested in trying to build one yourself, he has the full part listing on his website.